August 24, 2015

Colin McNickle Needs A Better Source On Birthright Citizenship

In a recent column, McNickle discusses the amendment and comes to this question:

“All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof (emphasis added), are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.”

The high court, citing not only common law but the 14th Amendment, ruled 6-2 that citizenship was guaranteed to all persons born in the United States, regardless of their heritage.

So, case closed, right? The Supreme Court ruled birthright citizenship is the law of the land for all, right? The Donald Trump argument is populist pap and for naught, right? [Italics in Original.]

To which he answers:

Well, not exactly.

The Wong case involved the child of legal resident aliens. “The Supreme Court has never ruled directly on the question of birthright citizenship for the children of illegal aliens,” wrote Lino A. Graglia, a University of Texas law professor, in a seminal 2010 white paper.

Finally,
blacks
are
not
in
fact
"underrepresented,"
but
rather
"overrepresented"--that
is,
their
numbers
are
disproportionately
high-in
institutions
of
higher
education once
IQ
scores
are
taken
into
account."
In
general,
more
than
half
of
the
students
in
the bottom
ten
percent
of
a
school's
IQ
range
will
be
black.

But let's get to back the 14th Amendment. The House has already heard from Prof Graglia on this new fangled rewrite of that constitutional principle. And this is what the Washington Post's Dana Millbank wrote about it - back in April:

Judiciary Committee Republicans brought in three experts to testify in support of this extraordinary maneuver (a lone Democratic witness was opposed), and they evidently had to search far and wide for people who would take this view, because they ended up with a bizarre witness: an octogenarian professor from the University of Texas named Lino Graglia.

This would be the Lino Graglia who caused a furor in 1997 when he said that Latinos and African Americans are “not academically competitive with whites” and come from a “culture that seems not to encourage achievement.” He also said at the time that “I don’t know that it’s good for whites to be with the lower classes.”

This is also the same Lino Graglia who said in a 2012 interview that black and Hispanic children are less “academically competent” than white children, and he attributed the academic gap to the “deleterious experience” of being reared by single mothers. When the interviewer, a black man, said he had a single mother, Graglia said that “my guess would be that you’re above usual smartness for whites, to say nothing of blacks.”

1 comment:

It also ignores the fact that the Chinese Exclusion Act made Wong's parents illegal. Had they ever left the US, they wouldn't have been able to return. He also ignores Plyler v Doe, which holds that the 14th Amendment applies to native born children of undocumented residents.

It also relies on a rather tortured interpretation of what "subject to the jurisdiction" of the U.S. means. Now I'm no lawyer, but thanks to my job, I'm familiar with this concept. Everybody in the US, its possessions and territories, are protected by the Constitution, no matter their citizenship or legal status. You cannot, for example, violate someone's 4th or 5th Amendment rights just because they've overstayed their visa. What that particular clause applies to are foerign diplomats and staff, who are immune to enforcement of our laws. That's why when you see a diplomat plate on a car in D.C., you just stay out of the way.